Andrew
Purves was born in 1912 in the parish of Linton, near Kelso, Roxburghshire. His boyhood ambition was
to become a shepherd like his father before him. He achieved his goal, and during a long career of
shepherding he worked on farms in the vicinity of Kelso as well as further afield in Berwickshire and
Glas Water, and over the Border in Glendale and Otterburn. This career spanned a period of sweeping
changes in the structure of agricultural communities and of rural life, during which the countryside
of his childhood and youth has altered almost beyond recognition. ‘The life and work of the people
about whom I write lives on only in the memory, and what is now being forgotten by the few of us who
remain will soon be lost forever and to all. No-one has yet spoken for these, the men and women of the
Border touns.’